The 1918 "King-Crane Commission Report" - U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson takes a democratic headcount in Palestine

I am the descendant of a rabbinical family, the only son of Simha Guterman, a Zionist and Socialist who died as a hero and a fighter against the Nazis in the Warsaw uprising. I was rescued from the Holocaust and brought to Israel; I served in the army and built my home in Israel.

A son was born to me, called Raz‑‑a son who grew up to be a great pride to his family, strong and beautiful and honest and upright in his character. Despite personal misfortunes and difficulties, I raised him with unending love and affection and with great pride as a father. In my secret thoughts, I saw him as a link in the chain of history, and in his being and character, along with others like him, the realization of our people's renewal.

When the time came for him to join the army, he volunteered, in the spirit in which he was educated, for one of the special units, one of the most challenging units of the army, and there he served with great effort and devotion. He was due to be released in a few weeks and his plans were many. Along with my son and his friends, I was aware of the government's intentions, and we lived in constant fear. Every night, I went to bed with a prayer in my heart that war might be avoided.

Every child knows that Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon sought a reason to break into Lebanon to instigate the first war that was not a war of defense. They sought to undo, with this questionable military victory, all their failures, inadequacies and frustrations.

I remained with a prayer in my heart that reasonable and concerned people in Israel and abroad would prevent them from this madness, but my desire and the desire of the sons was not fulfilled. The bullet fired in London caused them to send lethal war machines to spread death into the cities of Lebanon and its villages. When the Katyushas returned fire, the hour they been waiting for impatiently finally arrived. With unabashed effrontery, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan, and the ministers who voted for the war in Lebanon sloganized Peace for Galilee when there had been no shots fired in Galilee for over a year.

My son Raz, my beloved son, and his friends were sent with their unit, in great haste and frenzied irresponsibility, to bloody battle to take the Beaufort. He was the first one to break through the trenches leading to the fortress.&nnbsp; He fought valiantly and there he found his death.

Thus was severed the chain of unending Jewish generations, ancient and full of heroism and suffering, and thus was cut off the flowering of a life that was just beginning to blossom.

And thus they caused the destruction of my whole world.

How many years would it have taken the Palestinian terrorists to kill and injure so many Israeli soldiers as these people did in the course of one week of this damnable war? How much loss and mourning have they caused?

Even before the blood was dry on the rocks of the mountain of Beaufort, Begin and Sharon hurried into their helicopters, surrounded by photographers, motion‑picture cameras, and microphones, to declare and sound forth with vanity. They did not even ask forgiveness for the mistakes or the dark devices of their nationalistic schemes and their adventurous irresponsibility.

And the voice of our sons' blood cries from the ground!

And if they have only a spark of conscience and humanity, may my great pain pursue them forever, the suffering of a father in Israel whose world has been destroyed and the joy of life destroyed in him forever.

Yaakov Guterman

JERUSALEM POST—1982

If you somehow missed the point in Mr. Guterman's letter, there had been no terrorist attacks in over a year before Ariel Sharon drove Israel's army into Lebanon to "protect" Israel from terrorism.